Club Dead

“Where’s the man?” shouted Lily as she leaned over the edge of the platform. The sight of my eight-year-old sister hanging over the precipice startled my mother into action.

           “Oh my God, Lily, get back from there!” Mom grabbed her by the arm and hustled her to the rear of the cluster of tourists in yellow helmets and Sky Trek employees in safari jackets, all of whom stared down into the mist. Nothing was visible below the clouds, but the import of the dangling zipline was unmistakable. A walkie-talkie squawked and the lead Trekker sprinted to the far side of the aerial tramway and into the small operator’s kiosk. My father followed her and stood outside, obviously eavesdropping on her conversation.

           “Well?” asked my mother when he returned. Dad nodded.

           “They’re shutting down for the day; offering us all free dinner and drinks at the restaurant down in base camp.” He took Lily’s hand. “Let’s get on that tram while there’s still room.”

           “But I wanted to ride the zip line with the monkeys.” Lily wailed as she tried to wrench her arm free.

           “Lily, a man just died here,” said my mother softly. “We have to be respectful.”

           “I don’t care. He’s stupid. This vacation is stupid. All our vacations are stupid. Why can’t we just go to Disneyland like normal people?”

           “But honey, we saw sloths! I bet no one else at Paloma Elementary saw sloths on their summer vacation.”

           “Sloths are stupid.”

That night, you would have been forgiven if you confused Lily with the bratty girl in Willy Wonka. She refused to eat the olla de carne that the base camp restaurant offered as our consolation dinner because “Plantains are gross.” When we got back to our hotel room, my exasperated parents left me in charge and went down to the bar. Lily put a blanket over her head and watched Avatar: The Last Airbender with the sound blasting. Then she announced she was starving. “I want a Trits cup!” she yelled, referring to the Costa Rican ice cream and cookie treats we had both become addicted to.

            Even though I knew better than to try to reason with my sister when she’s in a mood, I decided to take one for the team. “Well, you should have eaten your dinner!”

           “I hated that stuff. Plus, everyone was acting weird because that stupid guy died.”

           “Lily, it’s no one’s fault that the zip line broke and someone died.”

           Lily furrowed her brow and glowered at me. Michael Corleone’s got nothing on my sister when it comes to the death stare. “I hate this family. Something always goes wrong on our stupid vacations. And I want a Trits cup.” That’s how I had ended up in the hotel lobby.

           And, if I’m being honest, I was wrong. It was someone’s fault.

Lily might have been a holy terror, but she wasn’t totally off base. As I rode down in the elevator, I scrolled through the photo album titled The Morgue that I had started four years earlier, when I got my first phone in my freshman year of high school. I was the only one who ever saw these photos because we weren’t allowed to share vacation pictures outside the family or post anything to TikTok or Instagram. Mom said it was to protect me and Lily from child predators and the overly intrusive world of social media. I thought the rule was a drag. I could have used the pictures to dispel the rumor that I really spent my summers shoveling manure at a horse camp.

           Dad is an infectious disease expert at the Salk Institute in La Jolla. His job takes him all over the world for conferences and field work and he and Mom usually combine a family vacation with his work trips. We’ve been to some pretty fantastic places, but , as Lily had noted, that day’s incident was just the latest in a long line of vacation debacles. These experiences did, however, provide great fodder for The Morgue.

            The first image that came up was the selfie of me and General Lubanga, a fellow guest on the photo safari we took the summer after ninth grade. Dad had given the keynote address celebrating the eradication of guinea worm disease at a summit in Nairobi hosted by the Carter Center. After that, we headed out for the Serengeti. General Lubanga and I took a shine to each other. He said I had the heart of a warrior, which sounded way better to me than being a manure shoveler. I thought the general was cool because he always wore an olive drab uniform festooned with medals and a pistol in his belt. When I asked him about the medals, he said he was the defense minister of a corps of freedom fighters and that where he came from boys who joined the army had all the girlfriends they wanted. I fantasized about moving to his country.

           In the photo, I’m wearing the general’s beret and holding the pistol. Dad discovered us just as Nuru, one of our guides, snapped the picture. After directing some choice words about the pistol at the two men, he whisked me into a waiting Range Rover. “Bad dude,” he whispered to me. But that just further enchanted fourteen-year-old me.

           The last time I saw the General, he lay in the dry grass outside the safety perimeter of our camp. His uniform was shredded and the ground around him was stained rusty brown. There was rope around his feet and his beret and pistol lay several feet away. “Man-eating lion,” intoned Nuru, with a knowing shake of his head. “Looks like his feet got tangled up, although how that happened or why he was out here in the middle of the night, only the gods can say.”

           Next, I clicked on the picture of my mom and sister in front of the timber-framed Cotswolds House in Oxford, our temporary lodgings while Dad guest-lectured at Balliol College between my sophomore and junior years. If there was one thing I had learned from being forced by my mother to watch endless episodes of Inspector Morse on PBS, it was that Oxford has an unusually high homicide rate. Still, I was pretty blown away when a dead Russian double agent was discovered slumped over on a bench on the green in the middle of town. Our landlady Mrs. Mottershead told me he had been stabbed with the poisoned tip of a “brolly” found at the scene. “I seen it on the telly,” she said.

           “Treason is a dishonorable craft,” said my mother later that evening. “And what goes around, comes around. Still, I think it’s time for us to go.”

           That’s when I created The Morgue. Photo reminders of all the deaths that had happened while we were on vacation. There was “Monkey Wrench,” standing confidently on the riverbank just hours before he fell out of the raft and drowned in the Colorado on our way to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Last spring I added Dr. Lefebvre.

           When I swiped to the shot of him and Lily playing Uno in a tent in Port au Prince, I felt a pang. Dr. Lefebvre had come from Marseille to head up the local Doctors Without Borders unit following an earthquake. My dad was in Haiti to consult on the cholera outbreak that followed the disaster. When Dr. Lefebvre wasn’t treating victims pulled from the rubble, or complaining to anyone who would listen that he needed more cholera vaccine, he played Uno with Lily. He taught her to shout “Un!” in French when she was down to her last card. She said Dr. Lefebvre was the only person we’d ever met on vacation who wasn’t stupid. Shortly after the picture was taken, Dr. Lefebvre was crushed by falling concrete from a damaged building. We left for Puerto Rico the next day, where we spent the rest of spring break snorkeling.

           And just that day I had added a shot of the broken zip line. We had toured Costa Rica’s amazing national parks after Dad’s presentation on the Zika virus at Universidad de Ciencias Médicas in San Jose. We kayaked the rainforest canals of Tortuguero and saw the aforementioned sloths in abundance. In Corcovado, we encountered twenty-five kinds of frogs. Our last stop was the Monteverde Cloud Forest, renowned for its low hanging mists; rare quetzal birds; and ziplining in the forest canopy, where you are likely to be accompanied by howler and capuchin monkeys. Of course, we never made it on the zipline.

           When the elevator reached the lobby, I put my phone in my pocket and headed for the hotel sundry shop. It was then I discovered I had spent my last colón at the zipline snack shop. I remembered that my parents were in the bar. I could get some cash from them.

           They sat in a secluded spot among trees teeming with chirping and calling birds, which obscured me from their view as I walked toward their table. My mother sipped on a guaro sour and my dad had a half full glass of chelada in front of him. Just two American tourists enjoying their last local cocktail before heading home. What caught my attention was their companion. In his heavy black suit, he stood out among the sundresses and aloha shirts of the hotel guests. He blotted the perspiration running down his face with an immense white cotton handkerchief. He handed my dad a slip of paper.

           “U.S. dollars in this account, as agreed. Bolivia thanks you, señor. That’s one less narco for us to contend with. But the snake has many heads and Costa Rica is their favorite vacation destination. Perhaps you would consider another commission?”

           My dad shook his head curtly. “No, we never go to the same place twice.” This conversation made me start sweating. “One less narco?” What kind of commission were they talking about? Just then, my mom looked up and saw me standing there. My distress must have been apparent because she jumped up and hastily said, “What are you doing here, honey? And where’s your sister?”

           Ignoring her, I said, “What’s going on here, Dad?”

           The sweaty man in the black suit pushed his chair back. “I think it is time for me to go.” He nodded to my parents. “Señor, Señora. Buenas noches.”

           As soon as the man was out of earshot, my mother reeled on my dad. “I told you something like this was bound to happen. He’s almost seventeen, for crying out loud. Too old for us to be able to hide things from.” She gulped down the rest of her drink. “Fix this,” she said and headed to the elevator.

           Dad looked at me the same way he had when I turned fifteen and he taught me how to use a condom. “We need to talk,” he said in a somber tone. He looked around. “Not here, though. Let’s go sit by the pool.”  

***

As we sat in the VIP lounge of Avianca Airlines, waiting for our flight home, my sister was still fuming about the fact that she hadn’t gotten her Trits cup the night before. When we finally settled into our first class seats—me and Dad on one side of the aisle, Lily and Mom on the other—she put on her headphones, brought up My Hero Academia on her iPad and proceeded to ignore the spectacular vista below us as we climbed to our cruising altitude. With any luck, she’d fall asleep and I wouldn’t have to listen to any more of her griping. I needed time to think.

           On the one hand, what my father had told me as we sat by the pool slapping at mosquitoes explained a lot—the fabulous vacations, the hasty departures, the overabundance of dead bodies. On the other hand, my generous and loving parents were apparently horrible human beings. I contemplated asking the flight attendant to have Interpol waiting for us when we landed in Miami.

            As if sensing my uneasiness, my dad said, “Thanks for helping out with your sister yesterday.” He patted my arm, which lay on the armrest between us. “And thank you for being understanding about, um, that other thing.” I pulled my arm away.

            What Dad had interpreted as my being understanding was actually shock. “I’m not sure I do understand, Dad. Is it just for the money?”

            Dad’s voice was so soft I had to lean over to hear him. “Well that’s certainly part of the appeal, but really it’s because they were bad people who made dangerous enemies. General Lubanga massacred villages that opposed his authority. Monkey Wrench was an Earth Firster who put spikes into redwood trees so lumberjacks would be injured when they tried to cut them down.”

           “Okay, fair enough. And the guy yesterday was a drug lord. But what about Dr. Lefebvre? He saved people. Poor people.”

           Dad looked down at his lap and sighed. “Well, yes, he did. That is, when he wasn’t getting rich selling vaccine on the black market. The guys at the Health Ministry didn’t like him cutting into their own side action.” Wow! Lily was wrong. Lefebvre was stupid.

           “And Mom’s okay with all this?”

           Dad chuckled. “Are you kidding? In the business she’s known as Poison Penny. You didn’t really think she lost her umbrella in Oxford, did you? Your mother never loses anything.”

            I looked across the aisle at my mother, who stared out the window. I had a bit of difficulty synching my dad’s version of her up with the one who volunteered at the snack bar at my swim meets. I tried to picture her in leg irons and decided to hold off on Interpol while I tried to make sense of things.

***

Dad stuck his head through the door of my bedroom grinning like the Cheshire Cat. “Are you ready, son? Have your passport? The Uber will be here in half an hour to take us to the Aer Lingus terminal.”

           I waved my passport before slipping it into my messenger bag. “All set!”

           Dad continued beaming. “Your first mission for the family business! I never thought I’d see the day. But don’t get too distracted. You’re still starting college next month. Stanford! Your mom and I are so proud. ”

           It had taken me almost a year to come around, but in the end I came to see my parents’ work as kind of a public service. The exotic locales were a bonus.

           “Oh, I know, Dad. I’m thinking about majoring in chemistry and following in Mom’s footsteps. But right now, I’m really excited about going to Ireland. I can’t wait to visit the Giant’s Causeway.” I slid my copy of Dubliners in next to my passport. “Was this guy really part of the IRA crew that killed Earl Mountbatten? Jeez, he must be pushing seventy now. Why bother after all this time?”

           “Well, now that the Queen is dead and Charles is King . . . Let’s just say that some people have long memories.”

           “Well, maybe the IRA felt justified. It’s not like the English empire had clean hands.”      

“We don’t decide who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s enough to know that they are bad dudes with nasty enemies.” His phone buzzed. “There’s the Uber. Now remember, not a word to Lily. Your mother doesn’t want to bring her in until she’s at least fourteen.”

           “You got it, Dad.” I wondered what Lily’s specialty would be. Probably irritating people until they cut their own throats.